|
That water extinguishes fire and fire consumes other things
should not astonish us. The thing destroyed derived its being
from outside itself: this is no case of a self-originating
substance being annihilated by an external; it rose on the ruin
of something else, and thus in its own ruin it suffers nothing
strange; and for every fire quenched, another is kindled.
In the immaterial heaven every member is unchangeably itself for
ever; in the heavens of our universe, while the whole has life
eternally and so too all the nobler and lordlier components, the
Souls pass from body to body entering into varied forms- and,
when it may, a Soul will rise outside of the realm of birth and
dwell with the one Soul of all. For the embodied lives by virtue
of a Form or Idea: individual or partial things exist by virtue
of Universals; from these priors they derive their life and
maintenance, for life here is a thing of change; only in that
prior realm is it unmoving. From that unchangingness, change had
to emerge, and from that self-cloistered Life its derivative,
this which breathes and stirs, the respiration of the still life
of the divine.
The conflict and destruction that reign among living beings are
inevitable, since things here are derived, brought into existence
because the Divine Reason which contains all of them in the upper
Heavens- how could they come here unless they were There?- must
outflow over the whole extent of Matter.
Similarly, the very wronging of man by man may be derived from an
effort towards the Good; foiled, in their weakness, of their true
desire, they turn against each other: still, when they do wrong,
they pay the penalty- that of having hurt their Souls by their
evil conduct and of degradation to a lower place- for nothing can
ever escape what stands decreed in the law of the Universe.
This is not to accept the idea, sometimes urged, that order is an
outcome of disorder and law of lawlessness, as if evil were a
necessary preliminary to their existence or their manifestation:
on the contrary order is the original and enters this sphere as
imposed from without: it is because order, law and reason exist
that there can be disorder; breach of law and unreason exist
because Reason exists- not that these better things are directly
the causes of the bad but simply that what ought to absorb the
Best is prevented by its own nature, or by some accident, or by
foreign interference. An entity which must look outside itself
for a law, may be foiled of its purpose by either an internal or
an external cause; there will be some flaw in its own nature, or
it will be hurt by some alien influence, for often harm follows,
unintended, upon the action of others in the pursuit of quite
unrelated aims. Such living beings, on the other hand, as have
freedom of motion under their own will sometimes take the right
turn, sometimes the wrong.
Why the wrong course is followed is scarcely worth enquiring: a
slight deviation at the beginning develops with every advance
into a continuously wider and graver error- especially since
there is the attached body with its inevitable concomitant of
desire- and the first step, the hasty movement not previously
considered and not immediately corrected, ends by establishing a
set habit where there was at first only a fall.
Punishment naturally follows: there is no injustice in a man
suffering what belongs to the condition in which he is; nor can
we ask to be happy when our actions have not earned us happiness;
the good, only, are happy; divine beings are happy only because
they are good.
|
|